


Draco Dormiens Nunquam Titillandus

by isthisenoughorcanwegohigher



Category: The Maze Runner Series - All Media Types
Genre: Dragonrider AU, TMR Reverse Bang, TMR Reverse Bang 2019, the last chapter will be updated to be the sketch that was the prompt for this story
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-25
Updated: 2019-09-25
Packaged: 2020-10-06 12:56:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20507363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isthisenoughorcanwegohigher/pseuds/isthisenoughorcanwegohigher
Summary: The Maze had always been a bitter, dangerous, subterranean place, but the Gladers had never been alone in there. Befriending a dragon was just the first step - running the Maze with them and ultimately escaping WCKD, that was the goal. Together.





	Draco Dormiens Nunquam Titillandus

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Huge thanks to the TMR Reverse Big Bang crew for putting this event together, and several thanks to my artist, @hi0ctane here on AO3, for the absolutely gorgeous sketch that inspired this story! Without further ado, here is Draco Dormiens Nunquam Titillandus!

Like all things good and bad do, it started with an idea.

The founders of World Catastrophe Killzone Department were worn and tired, exhausted to the bone. Their first idea—a plague of their own making that would cull the population and save the planet—had gotten wildly out of hand when they realized too late that they could not control it outside of lab conditions.

The Flare. That’s what they’d started calling it, when other worldly occurrences took place. Solar flares had always been a source of panic for the general public, who didn’t understand what they meant. And so WCKD had latched onto that fear when the solar flares started reaching further and further into the atmosphere, scorching the earth.

And so it came to be that the Flare took over the world. An out of control population control experiment that warped the brains of its victims and turned them into angry monsters intent on nothing but killing the healthy, spreading the disease.

No one wanted to use the word “zombie”, because these people weren’t dead, not until the Flare ran its course or something--or someone--else killed them. The word zombie was especially frowned upon at WCKD, and so they called them Cranks.

It wasn’t spoken, but everyone at WCKD knew that despite how drastically wrong things had gone, their population control idea had worked. Now all they needed was a cure. The only problem was that the cure existed within the blood plasma of the next generation. It couldn’t be reproduced in any lab, it couldn’t be taken from one immune child and developed into a drug to be a cure. It could only be harvested from the immune children and given as a transfusion, but even then it often wasn’t enough.

It quickly became obvious that there was never going to be a real cure. The only hope they had was to find enough of the immune children in the world to harvest the plasma from.

Those who could see past the moral qualms of slowly killing children stayed, and planned, and plotted, and hunted. They needed children, they needed a place to keep them safe from the outside world, and they needed a way to keep them there.

And so the Maze Trials were born. Underground caverns were remade in the image of giant mazes with impossible directions, and impossible things were born from the fairytale feeling of it all.

WCKD had created dragons, proper fire-breathing, flying creatures bred in labs and taught from birth to herd and watch and if need be, kill.

Those who couldn’t handle the idea of sacrificing a generation to save another left, or disappeared under mysterious circumstances. The lucky ones saw what was coming, and stayed, and waited.


End file.
